Pray for the Ukraine!

The events of in the Ukraine are terrifying. We stand, a hundred years after the disaster of 1914, face to face with a Russian policy profoundly reminiscent of the nineteen thirties. One must never forget that the reason for all these events is that millions of Crimean Tartars and Eastern Ukrainians were murdered, starved to death and deported by Soviet tyranny and replaced with ethnic and linguistic Russians, permanently destabilising the Ukraine. So when you hear nonsense about the legitimate concerns of the Russia in these regions remember that those concerns were manufactured through mass murder for just such an occasion as this. St Volodymyr and St Olga pray for them!

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4 Responses to “Pray for the Ukraine!”

Aren’t the “legitimate concerns of Russia” in the Crimea analogous to the “legitimate concerns of the UK” in the north-eastern six counties of Ireland? And, although one might (as I do) disagree vehemently with the historical actions (plantation, ethnic cleansing, etc.) which brought about those situations, is there not an argument that if there is to be peace it is necessary to deal, in a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation, with the situation as we find it, a legacy of historical wrongs, rather than to insist uncompromisingly on historic rights which will lead to or perpetuate conflict?

No, not at all, no more than it would be ok for the UK to invade Ireland to protect the interests of Unionists.

What I mean is that if there is a substantial population of ethnic Russians in Ukraine it isn’t a sufficient argument to dismiss their interests by saying that they shouldn’t be there in the first place (just like the Protestants planted in Ireland). While that might be true in strict historical terms, it isn’t a way to get peace and harmony. Neither, of course, is massing your troops on the border or, worse still, invading.

But the English and then British government put those Protestants there four hundred years ago. They never wanted to partition Ireland in the twentieth century they wanted Home Rule or full dominion status or (more grudgingly) an independent Republic. The possession of the six counties apart from the rest within the UK was forced on the UK government by the Ulster Unionists’ threats of civil war (and by the errors and sins of the distant predecessors of the UK government). In international law the UK went from possessing all of Ireland to only six counties. They did not grant independence to the whole of Ireland and then invade Ulster twenty years later. In the case of the Ukraine, Russia fully recognised the sovereign independence of the Ukraine within its present borders and is a signatory to an international agreement promising to honour them. The crimes against the Crimean Tartars and the Eastern Ukrainians (however terrible those of the Protestant government in Westminster) are of a different order of magnitude and perpetrated within living memory. Russia’s actions are far more like Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39.